Instead, NASA officials essentially decided to move the retirement date of the shuttle from to , and in commissioned a study to identify the long-term requirements to make this possible. Recertification requirements should be included in the Service Life Extension Program. This report addresses recertification as a mid-term issue. Measured by their 20 or more missions per Orbiter, the Shuttle fleet is young, but by chronological age — 10 to 20 years each — it is old.
This recertification must be rigorous and comprehensive at every level i. A post-Challenger, year review was conducted, but it lacked this kind of rigor, comprehensiveness and, most importantly, integration at the subsystem and system levels.
Aviation industry standards offer ample measurable criteria for gauging specific aging characteristics, such as stress and corrosion. The Shuttle Program, by contrast, lacks a closed-loop feedback system and consequently does not take full advantage of all available data to adjust its certification process and maintenance practices.
Data sources can include experience with material and component failures, non-conformances deviations from original specifications discovered during Orbiter Maintenance Down Periods, Analytical Condition Inspections, and Aging Aircraft studies. Several of the recommendations in this report constitute the basis for a recertification program such as the call for nondestructive evaluation of RCC components.
Chapters 3 and 4 cite instances of waivers and certification of components for flight based on analysis rather than testing. The recertification program should correct all those deficiencies. The Columbia was struck by foam insulation upon launch causing damage to its heat shield. All of the crew members were lost in this unfortunate tragedy. A viable solution was never really discovered on how to prevent this from happening, and NASA had to resort to inspecting the shuttles after launch while in orbit to check for damage.
This was not an ideal solution, but allowed to Shuttles to fly as long as they did after the accident. It was at this point that a decision needed to be made about the future of the program, and the rest is now history.
After the 3 remaining Space Shuttles flew their final mission they were distributed to different museums across the United States. The process of deciding where each shuttle would be displayed was a difficult dicisions.
Twenty-six different institutions all submitted applications along with proposals for the they intended to display the orbiter vehicles. Space Shuttle Discovery had already been promised to the Smithsonian back in , so that left the Enterprise, which was actually a test shuttle that never made it into space or the Atlantis and Endeavour.
The Endeavour was awarded to the California Science Center who plans to display it in an upright launch configuration along with a retired pair of Solid Rocket Boosters and a mockup of the External Tank. The return of launches to U. Boeing is slightly behind SpaceX though, with the company hoping to conduct a manned test flight of the Starliner in Read more.
Newsweek magazine delivered to your door Unlimited access to Newsweek. Unlimited access to Newsweek. By the mids, much of the American public thought that spaceflight was routine. NASA was even launching astronauts into space wearing just simple coveralls and helmets, having ditched the pressure suits used in the Mercury , Gemini , and Apollo programs.
This forever dispelled the notion that spaceflight was routine. The shuttle was revealed to be a high-risk, experimental vehicle — something most astronauts had known all along. Still, the space agency took its lashings and made the changes required to get the shuttle flying again. Yet again, the entire crew — this time featuring the highly publicized first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon — was killed.
Although the technical cause of the Columbia disaster was very different than what led to the loss of Challenger , the investigation again found deep cultural problems at NASA.
The crew of STS, seen here, had their flight aboard Space Shuttle Columbia delayed 18 times before launching in While reentering Earth's atmosphere, Columbia broke apart, killing the entire crew.
All of these factors — high costs, slow turnaround, few customers, and a vehicle and agency that had major safety problems — combined to make the Bush administration realize it was time for the Space Shuttle Program to retire. In , President Bush gave a speech that outlined the end of the shuttle era, without clearly identifying what would come next or how much it would cost. This decision left NASA in limbo, as they were suddenly dependent on the Russians for access to space. The remaining three space shuttles, Discovery , Endeavour , and Atlantis , are now museum pieces, as is the test orbiter Enterprise.
Having seen some of these vessels in person, I can attest that they still are breathtaking sights to behold. With SpaceX already launching humans into space, and with other commercial space ventures making rapid progress, the future of manned spaceflight under NASA seems unclear.
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